Museum garden: Michael Stacheder reads from Max Mannheimer's "Late Diary"

Concentration camp survivor Max Mannheimer kept telling what happened to him.

His “Late Diary” was now read in Geretsried.

Geretsried

- A mild summer evening after great heat, people laughing in the nearby beer garden.

But it is very quiet in the garden of the Geretsried City Museum.

For the first time in a long time, Beate Ruda from the VHS and Anita Zwicknagl from the Cultural Office were able to personally invite you to an event on Thursday.

The guest was director and actor Michael Stacheder.

For him, too, in view of the lockdown caused by the pandemic, it was the first reading with a real audience since November.

“I'm happy to be here,” he said.

Stacheder brought heavy fare with him - Max Mannheimer's “Late Diary”.

Evi Greif and Conny Schubert, best known to most of the guests as interpreters of Yiddish songs, contributed sensitive melodies that accompanied the descriptions from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“Tzen brider” was particularly moving.

Marius Hammerschmied provided the perfect technology with light and sound.

Also read: The Max Mannheim Evening in the Waldramer Badehaus

“Max's voice is missing, especially in the last few months,” Stacheder reminded the guests right from the start. He first read from the memories of a simple but happy childhood in Mannheimer's hometown Neutitschein in Moravia, where he was born in 1920. “My first word wasn't 'papa', but 'car'”, you can read. He remained a car fanatic for a lifetime. Max Mannheimer becomes a good student, but above all a good footballer.

For two hours, the text covers important events such as the Anschluss of Austria, the Munich Conference and the Reichspogromnacht 1938: "Yesterday the synagogues burned ... The protection did not come from the police, it came from the mother." In December, the family "moved" Mannheimer moved to Ungarisch-Brod, from the summer of 1939 Max Mannheimer worked in road construction. “A strengthening for what was to come,” explains the reader.

Then everything happens in quick succession: Max Mannheimer falls in love with Eva Bock, marries her, and off to Theresienstadt (musical interlude: “Asoj wayt wek fun mir”). Auschwitz follows. The parents, Eva and sister Käthe go to the right during the selection process - into the gas. “From the transport of a thousand men, women and children, there are now 155 men.” For Max, his younger brother Edgar provides emotional support in this death factory.

The Auschwitz Passages are almost unbearable, and anyone who never got to know Mannheimer, never followed an eyewitness conversation with him and is not a historian must have been shocked by all of this.

Above all from the concise, crystal-clear language, the effect of which was reinforced by Stacher's lecture.

Max Mannheimer and his brother Edgar fought for the "privilege" of being able to go on transport in order to toil clearing the destroyed Warsaw ghetto.

After that the stations are the Plaszow camp (Max Mannheimer, trembling, gets to know the commandant Amon Göth), Kutno, Dachau.

After three weeks of quarantine, on to Karlsfeld, then Mühldorf.

Max Mannheimer gets typhus, is more dead than alive.

The Mühldorf camp was evacuated on April 28, 1945, and on April 30 the train stopped from the open track.

Max Mannheimer is free.

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"And we, what can we do?" Asked Stacheder into the mute, sad and shaken faces of the audience.

"Passing on your message, passing on your consolation," said the reader.

The benevolent reconciler Mannheimer, who died in 2016 at the age of 96, never tired of standing up for democracy, freedom and historical commemoration - and he insisted on becoming (honorary) member number 1 in the association “Citizens for the Bathhouse”.

Posture, dignity and self-control - that was important to him.

His “Late Diary” is a harrowing contribution against oblivion.

Dieter Klug

Info

Max Mannheimer: “Late diary.

Theresienstadt-Auschwitz-Warsaw-Dachau ”, Piper Verlag, 9 euros.